#50 — Lee Grant as Joyce Enders in The Landlord (1970) Lee Grant was accustomed to fighting for what she wanted. Grant was placed on the infamous Hollywood blacklist after delivering a pointed eulogy for character actor J. Edward Bromberg, … Continue reading Greatish Performances #50
The Landlord (Hal Ashby, 1970). The feature directorial debut from Hal Ashby stars Beau Bridges as Elgar Enders, a young man from a wealth family who buys an apartment building in a poverty-stricken Brooklyn neighborhood. His initial plans involves kicking … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — The Landlord; Annihilation; The Death of Stalin
#17 — The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973) When I first watched The Last Detail, some fifteen years ago, it was the first time that the reverential opinion usually afforded nineteen-seventies American cinema really began to fully make sense to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Seventeen
#19 — Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) A few months ago, I wrote about Hal Ashby’s Being There, proposing it as an excellent choice for the film geek debate over which work represented the true end of the artistic boom in … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Nineteen
#33 — Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975) There are so many different that a film can surprise, and I’ll freely and fully admit that I ultimately prefer the shrewder, more low-key surprises to the trickster gotchas designed to upend everything that … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Thirty-Three
#36 — Harold & Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971) Engaging in an exercise like this countdown naturally inspires the generation of all sorts of half-baked theories, trying to condense disparate ranges of films made by wildly different and unique directors into … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Thirty-Six
With my countdown of nineteen-eighties films approaching the end, I’ve been trying to both watch and rewatch important movies from the prior decade in preparation for the next naturally step backwards in my tops of the decade project. As for the latter endeavor, there are simply some movies that I haven’t seen in approaching thirty years (and perhaps never saw properly, given that my exposure to them was dictated by the way I watched the material on cable, not always the most ideal manner to take them in) and in order to figure out their placement on the pending list, … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Snow Angels (David Gordon Green, 2008). A grim, atmospheric drama about people living small, desolate lives and the way a family tragedy accentuates the levels of their dismay to such a point that bad choices begin to take over. Green handles the film with an elegant restraint that sometimes veers close to bloodlessness, but overall gives it a hard, tense sheen. Adapted from a novel, the film sometimes feels as though it’s missing out on the deeper psychological understanding that’s far easier to realize on the page than on the screen. It offers up nice actorly moments for Sam Rockwell … Continue reading Apted, Ashby, Cammisa, Green, Soderbergh
Coffee for Two 